I remember the first time I ever heard Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" -- or, rather, saw the video for it -- I was in a long-defunct bar on Second Avenue and 12th Street called The Dragon Bar*. I was with a quartet of similarly inclined friends, and we all were stopped pretty much dead in our tracks by it. The clip was immediately followed by the video for "There's No Other Way" by Blur. The latter song was not as widely celebrated as the former song -- then or since -- but I remember being quite struck by it, as well, and immediately put it to my drinking comrades: "Which was better?" You can probably imagine how that went.
This debate -- such as it was -- was immediately derailed when my friend Joanne walked over to the jukebox to put on the song below, handily drowning out the sound of the television. "This is better than fucking both!"
She was, of course, correct.
To all my Seattle people living in our new weird ground zero, please be safe.
*The Dragon bar closed by the mid-90's and became a gay bar called Dick's. Dick's had a long run before it, too, closed and became the comparatively drab 12th Street Ale House. A million years prior to the Dragon Bar, it was a storied watering hole called Slugger Ann.
Almost on cue, right after I shared the excellent documentary about the SoHo Memory Project here, I stumbled across the video below posted on the page of a Facebook group I follow. Titled “Walking in New York’s Most Expensive Neighbourhood [sic],” this lengthy clip is a wide-angled 4K video that showcases a rambling stroll around the SoHo of 2020, what the shooter – who goes by the YouTube handle “The 1%”…ugh --- calls “one of the most iconic shopping and fashion district of New York City.”
Astonishingly Trivial Bonus: If you’ve got a lot of time to kill and have a super-keen eye for detail, one of my stupid stickers that I spoke about here makes a fleeting cameo around 16:41 in. Can you spot it?
I’ve spoken about them a few times here before, notably here, here and here, but I was and remain a big fan of The Cult, dating back to their days as psychedelic goths through their period as hirsute ersatz-metalheads and beyond. Sure, they’ve been entirely capable of being roundly silly on many an occasion, but they’ve also penned a robust amount of unimpeachably great rock songs, regardless of whatever tribal affiliation you choose to adhere yourself to. If you can’t recognize the brilliance of tracks like “Wild Flower,” “The Witch,” “God’s Zoo,” “Rain” and – oh yes do wait for it – “She Sells Sanctuary,” I shall have to ask you to step outside.
In any case, I follow storied Cult guitarist Billy Duffy on Instagram, and today he posted the above photo, shot in New York City in 1983. Of it, the great man writes:
Last of the Mohicans 1983…Back in the Death Cult days I had a mohican for a while as can be seen in this pic taken in New York in August 1983. It was my first vacation in the States and I actually went over there on my own.
Now, beyond my fandom for the great Mr. Duffy, renowned for playing a fat, fuckoff Gretsch White Falcon with stylish aplomb, I was struck by this photo and my inability to accurately pinpoint its location.
To my mind, that looks like Chelsea’s fabled apartment complex, London Terrace on the far left hand side, which would put him somewhere east of Ninth Avenue and several blocks south of 23rd street, but I can’t be sure.
Also check out the ghost sign on the façade behind the tail of his `hawk. It seems to read “Harold & ______, Wholesalers”….
Ring any bells? Weigh in, location-spotters.
Here’s what he would have been up to, as the time, back when they were still Death Cult.
I’ve long been of the opinion – often unjustifiably – that if you can’t bother to think of a decent name for your band, I’m under no obligation to listen to your music.
It’s for this arguably silly reason that I initially turned a blithely deaf, disinterred ear towards bands like Chairlift and Car Seat Headrest. I mean, seriously – you couldn’t’t think of something better? I mean, there were bands like Shit Robot, Diarrhea Planet and Mannequin Pussy that I was turned off by, but at least they were sort of crassly amusing in a juvenile and/or scatological way. I similarly blanched at Pissed Jeans as …. ewww… but when I was emphatically informed of their considerable merits by my comrade Drew (recently invoked here), I was schooled in the error of my ways. Pissed Jeans is indeed a gross name, but it fits their aesthetic perfectly. When you hear their music, the name makes perfect sense.
One band I’ve absolutely never given the time of day to is an outfit called Real Estate. Why? Because fuck that name, that’s why. It’s beyond boring. As a result, I cannot tell you one, single thing about them. Not one.
Well, my prejudice towards them may be slavishly unjustified, as according to my comrade EV Grieve, their heart's in a comparable place to mine. The Brooklyn band are promoting their new album by “touring their favorite NYC record stores – even though three of them are now closed.”
A silly stunt that would only mean something to a smattering of people, but I’m one of those people. At some point today, they’ll be performing outside of the former sites of Other Music, Kim’s and my beloved Rocks In Your Head. They'll also be at Rough Trade.
Back in the late 2000’s (that always sounds weird), after getting laid off from my somewhat surreal gig at MTV News Online, I landed a permalancer postion at MSN.com, Microsofts’s online portal.The whole notion of an “internet portal” always seemed weird to me. Nine times out of ten, whenever I fired up ye olde internet, I usually had a specific destination in mind, but MSN was for PC-usin’ people who, evidently, were cool with just reading the first thing that literally popped on their screen when they launched their browser. In any case, I snagged a job as a homepage editor there, crafting pithy headlines and the like. It wasn’t exactly edgy or cool, but it was a solid-ish gig when I needed it to be, and I worked with some very nice people.
Among those people was a cat I’ve mentioned here before named Drew K. Drew and I instantly hit it off when someone brought to our mutual attention that we were both somewhat insufferably pretentious music jerks. Though a good ten years my junior, Drew harbored a comparable adoration for vintage hardcore punk. Once that was established, you could throw Drew and I on a shift for hours on end, and neither of us could shut up about various esoteric band-and-record citations.
Beyond our combined love of NYHC outfits like the Cro-Mags and Agnostic Front and storied D.C. crews like Minor Threat and S.O.A., Drew was deeply steeped in an encyclopedic fixation with all stripes of contemporary indie rock. As a result, where I was able to hip him to several punk and post-punk bands from before his era, he turned me onto more newer bands that I could ever quantify. Ironically, I came to appreciate more genuinely new music from working with Drew at MSN than I did in my two years at MTV News Online, where I only really learned the names of countless hip-hop acts I continue to largely not care about.
Anyway, this windy preamble is only to set the stage for the clip below, which is by a band called the Dirty Projectors. The Dirty Projectors were among countless other hipster acts – like Yeasayer, Les Savvy Fav, Be Your Own Pet, Au Revoir Simone, Vampire Weekend, Deerhunter, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Mew, Deerhoof, The XX, The Submarines, Cat Power, Jay Reatard, Little Dragon, The Ting Tings, Phoenix, The Pains of Being Pure at Heart, Papercuts, Chair Lift, Beach House, Cold Cave, Grizzly Bear, Surfer Blood, The Eddie Current Suppression Ring, Matt & Kim, Peter Bjorn & John, Broken Bells, Skye Ferreria and frankly way the Hell more I’ve since forgotten – that Drew rapturously turned me onto.
If I’m being honest, while I made a playlist on my iPod (fucking bite me) of the recommendations Drew had given me way back when, I cannot remember the title of the Dirty Projectors song I took a liking to. Don’t look to me for this sort of intel.
Here, meanwhile, is their newest one. I have no idea of it’s a radical departure from their normal stuff, nor does it really matter. I liked this clip in that it’s shot entirely in New York City. That might sound like a rigorouos cliché, but with the exception of some arfful shots on the Staten Island Ferry, most of the locations featured herein (the elevetor to the Second Avenue Subway line, the Occulus, the Vessel, the Fulton Center and the deeply shitty “supertall” at 432 Park Avenue), are all mostly new landmarks.
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